Have you ever wondered what goes into making it possible to use the restroom at 30,000 feet (10,000 m)? [Jason Torchinsky] at the Autopian recently gave us an interesting look at the history of the loftiest of loos.
The first airline toilets were little more than buckets behind a curtain, but eventually the joys of indoor plumbing took to the skies. Several interim solutions like relief tubes that sent waste out into the wild blue yonder or simple chemical toilets that held waste like a flying porta-potty predated actual flush toilets, however. Then, in the 1980s, commercial aircraft started getting vacuum-driven toilets that reduce the amount of water needed, and thus the weight of the system.
These vacuum-assisted aircraft toilets have PTFE-lined bowls that are rinsed with blue cleaning fluid that helps everything flow down the drain when you flush. The waste and fluid goes into a central waste tank that is emptied into a “honey truck” while at the airport. While “blue ice” falling from the sky happens on occasion, it is rare that the waste tanks leak and drop frozen excrement from the sky, which is a lot better than when the lavatory was a funnel and tube.
The longest ever flight used a much simpler toilet, and given the aerospace industry’s love of 3D printing, maybe a 3D printed toilet is what’s coming to an airplane lavatory near you?
In early 2000s those vacuum toilets were retrofitted to railway carriages from 1960s. Of course there was corruption and the winning contractor installed the system with pipes too small to properly handle toilet paper. For a couple of years (while national railway company bickered back and forth with said contractor in court) the official solution was to put used toilet paper in a bucket next to the bowl. You can imagine the smell at the end of an 8 hour journey, when it’s mid June, 30°C outside (and that’s in shadow!) and the train is packed full of people (tickets registered to a specific seat were not a thing, at least not for 2nd class). Sometimes when toilet was clogged, people would even take a dump in the bucket itself…
i rememeber once when i was in Italy and needed to take the train from near Montepulciano to Rome, I was on a taxi just before getting to the train station. Something was wrong with my guts and it was all I could do to clench certain muscles to keeo from destroying the back seat for the whole ride as the cab driver whipped around curves at gut-wrenching speed. We got to the train station just as the train was about to leave, so there was no time to go to a proper train bathroom. So I ended up having to find a functioning toilet on the train. I opened the door to the first toilet and found it brimming over with a foul brown fluid, so I couldn’t use that. The next toilet I found had the same problem. But then I found a toilet which whose bowl was only half full of that foul substance. “This’ll work!” I cried as I took my seat. When I was done, there was of course no toilet paper, so then I had to walk stiff-legged to various other toilets until I found some old newspaper. But it was a fun trip otherwise.
Don’t travel without tissues at least.
That was just in case people didn’t get the moral of the story.
Many years ago in Portugal a recovered mysterious ice “meteorite”, with a bright blue colour, made the headlines in the media. The next day was revealed the origin of the object. Ice, tainted by blue WC desinfectant, filled with turds. :-D
That was done here is the USA also. I long for the old style which just washed the toilet out onto the tracks below. I don’t know of one ever malfunctioning. The commuter trains on the old New Jersey Central just had a wooden box with a seat on top which was open to the tracks below. Strangely, the mandate for change didn’t come from the track workers but from the government.
Human feces are used to spread disease. To rid them in proper, organized way is not a luxury but necessity.
Some use Bio-Toilet (Anaerobic Digester) and Composting Toilet (Aerobic) as we’ll.
The B-2 bomber famously is equipped with a few creature comforts: a bed, a microwave, and a toilet.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-b-2-spirit-stealth-bomber/
Bombing IGIL is a hard work and soldiers need to eat. They can’t do it on sweets, coffee and ramen alone.
So we still have the potential to dodge icybms?
Bravo
Can still happen. Leaky part or sloppy maintenance but it’s still rare. I bet most of the frozen stuff ends up in rural area and no one notices it, a lot of US are empty, especially in the central and in desert area. And if it falls at night, the blue and yellow stuff will melt and be gone before anyone’s up. Any turd left behind will probably be mistaken as coming from a bear with GI problem
A lot of us live in fly-over land but still are under heavy flight paths. Many lined up contrails sometimes reveal this overhead where I live between Chicago and Atlanta, #1 and #2 rated.
There’s a map with aggregate flight density shown, I remember we are as dense as any place else like Heathrow. Ducking out to look at those maps reaffirms this.
Interesting timing of this post, I just say a Mythbuster episode about obese woman who got stuck on airplane toilet due to powerful vacuum. Busted. With toilet seat, an air-tight seal doesn’t happen. Even if the woman used the toilet without the seat, the outside part and the inside funnel aren’t air-tight either. Obese flier are safe from embarrassing stuck-to-toilet problem.
I’ve heard the same myth but in the version I heard the woman’s intestines got sucked out! No I didn’t believe it.
Yeah that didn’t happen. I am sure the engineers did test the toilet before allowing it to be used by a human to make sure no one got hurt since companies hated lawsuit. It probably got posted as a “that didn’t happen” story that got circulated a but and became a global myth
Interesting bit of trivia, the first plane, well passenger plane, with a toilet was designed in Russia by Igor Sikorsky, the helicopter guy. And yes, it was a hole.
In a helicopter the s**t really could hit the fan!
Only if your flying it upside down, possible in Ka-52 but not any other chopper.
(But Ka-52 doesn’t have sanitary facility on board.)